A Voice for Men’s Robert O’Hara rebuts misogyny charge with revelation that his mother is a woman

Men’s Rights Activists continue to make strategic use of the media attention they’ve gained as a result of the Elliot Rodger killings. Yesterday, Al Jazeera America ran an interview with A Voice for Men’s “US News Director” Robert O’Hara in which he touched upon numerous important Men’s Rights issues, like the fact that he doesn’t hate women because his mother is one, and how it was totally an amazing publicity coup for AVFM to be singled out as a misogynistic hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Let’s look at some highlights from his Q and A. (The block quotes are direct quotes from the man, the legend, himself.)

Men aren’t having a giant patriarchy party all the time:

The idea of male entitlement is almost entirely a fabrication of feminist ideology. The idea that men kind of run the show – this patriarchy theory – and that we’re having a big huge party at the expense of women is really a hateful idea.

I don’t have the statistics with me but I’m totally sure that rape almost never happens:

We hear all these silly lies: there’s a rapist behind every corner; all men are potential rapists. …

I don’t have the exact statistics with me right now, but you’ll see it’s usually around 2 percent of women in their lifetime will have some kind of problem with sexual assault. …

[T]his whole rape things has been used by feminists to garner political power, lots of it, and money. The whole thing has been used as a scam.

(O’Hara’s claim about the rareness of rape was such a whopper that Al Jazeera felt obligated to note that a recent large-scale study by the Centers for Disease Control found that one in five women in America had experienced rape or attempted rape. Not one in fifty.)

When feminists talk about rape it apparently causes homophobia or unhealthy gay sex or something:

There’s no doubt that male sexuality has been demonized in our culture. And that’s a real shame. I think that inhibits a lot of men’s sexuality to the extent where it’s not healthy – especially homosexuals, especially gay men.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is totally irrelevant and besides they did us a favor by calling us hateful:

The SPLC, they’re not a credible organization, not like they once were. And I think the whole this of them listing us, or targeting us as a hate group didn’t work out too well for them. It worked out much better for us [in terms of publicity] than it did for them.

All you need is love:

I love women. My mom is a woman. … What I do not like is that we live in a culture and in a legal environment where if you do choose to have a relationship with a woman, it makes things very complicated and oftentimes dangerous.

Great job, Bob! Another flawless victory for the Men’s Rights Movement!

All mocking aside, I have found video proof of this last claim. Marriage can be very dangerous for men. Heck, they don’t even have to be the one getting married.

So, after we got home from the musical, my sister wanted me to see the trailer for the new ABC musical, “Gallavant,” and I got sucked into You Tube videos. It started with kitties, then went to reactions to the Red Wedding, at Game of Thrones.

So, now I’m watching Game of Thrones on Amazon instant view. Wow. Sad, but gripping.

I think I can buy Season 4 in September? And no one knows when the books will be complete. Sigh. I HATE getting sucked into an incomplete series.

Mists of Avalon – I liked the movie, but couldn’t finish the book. I don’t know how close it is to the book, but even within the first 100 pages, there were noticeable differences.

I just hated the fact that every time a woman ate, it was pointed out that she “ate sparingly.” EVERY SINGLE TIME. OK, only in the first 100 pages, but still, every time in that first 100 pages, she ate sparingly. What’s up with that? And it wasn’t because “Morgana wasn’t feeling particularly hungry just then, so she just sort of picked at her food, to be polite.” No, she simply “ate sparingly,” as if she had the appetite for more, but refrained. Something about the way it was written made me think that every woman was on a constant diet, and it just bothered me. Maybe it’s because if the woman actually ate her fill, but it didn’t take much to fill her up, if she simply did not have much of an appetite in the normal course of her life, then she wouldn’t have “eaten sparingly.” She simply would have eaten her fill, which didn’t take that much. The word “sparingly” wouldn’t have even been mentioned. So, it seemed to me, as a reader, that every woman, at every meal, denied herself.

I don’t know, maybe I missed a time when a woman simply “ate” her meal, but “ate sparingly” was mentioned often enough for it to just BUG me, and I stopped reading. I was just getting into body positivity, and learning to stop hating my body for not being the model of “beauty” and “health.” OK, health, yeah, but I’ve always had health issues, since that mystery illness when I was a baby, and I wasn’t fat then, so it’s not because I’m fat. The fat just came along later. It’s not the CAUSE of my bad health, and losing the weight wouldn’t cure my bad health, either. And even with all my health problems, and the susceptibility to every cold, flu, and bug that comes along, and the dizzy spells and headaches and slow-tipping-over days, and being “drunk” even without having consumed anything that could make me drunk (since I was a teen, and hadn’t ever even taken a pain pill beyond Tylenol), and the seeing stars, and the weak-almost-fainting spells, and the innumerable doctors’ visits and tests that never say what the heck is wrong with my body or how to fix it, there is still SO MUCH RIGHT about my body! I can walk and talk and blink and breathe and all of it unassisted! If I sit down and list all the things that my body CAN do, all the amazing things it DOES, all the time, I’d be amazed! So, I decided to stop hating on my body, just because it doesn’t fit the mold of current conventional beauty, and start loving it, and myself. And diet talk is kind of triggering, so I put the book down.

But I do quite enjoy the movie. So, if you were turned off by the book, don’t necessarily avoid the movie. It all depends, I suppose, on why you were turned off by the book.

Actually, now that I think about it, I’m glad I did put the book down. Five years ago, I would have just sucked it up as “the way it is for women,” (none of the men ate sparingly), and swallowed my discomfort at it all, because I’m fat, and deserve to feel uncomfortable about it, and women HAVE to diet to look thin and beautiful for men, and yadda yadda yadda. Now, I’m strong enough to say, “Forget that stuff! There are plenty of other good books to read,” and just put it down.

I’m strong enough now, to just walk away from painful things, and not feel obligated to put up with them, and the pain they bring me. Because I used to think I deserved the pain, and if I were better, I wouldn’t even feel the pain. Now I know better. Now I can tell society, and the individual people in it, who hurt me, just “No,” and walk away.

It may seem like weakness, from the outside, but it really does take some strength to say, “No,” and be truly aware that I DO deserve peace, and I have the right to refuse to put up with that stuff, and to claim that right and use it.

And when I feel like fighting, and can do that, too.

Feminism, for the win!

Also, fun fact – I started dieting at age 10. I dieted for 30 years of my life. At 40, I stopped dieting. And at 40, I stopped gaining weight!

I truly believe that the weight-loss industry is a branch of “the patriarchy,” with the goal of keeping people so obsessed about food, exercise, and trying to force their bodies into this mold that some marketer created that they simply do not have the strength or mental energy and focus it takes to actually fight the patriarchy. I mean, think about it. When you’re on a diet, can you really focus on anything else? How productive can you really be? Oh, sure, you can get your work done, but can you be MARVELOUS? Can you be AMAZING? Can you be a real mover and shaker and warrior? Nope. Because you’re too busy counting calories, logging exercises, and lying to yourself that those aren’t really hunger pangs, and that the pain is “good for you.” It’s the patriarchy, in disguise, and using it as a stealth operation to keep women down! And if it takes a bunch of other people down, along with it, well, that’s just collateral damage.

Dude was standing right in front of me, saying, “Don’t attack me. I’m unarmed,” while grabbing his dagger from behind his back, and I said (probably too loudly), “NO, he’s NOT! The little liar!”

Reminds me of Wyrd Sisters…
“Who hath done this foul and nasty deed?”
“HE DONE IT! We all seen it, clear as day!”

Yes, dudes, women CAN gtell the difference between catcalls and compliments! It’s so blatantly obvious. Why can’t you guys get it?

I don’t think they really have any trouble understanding the difference, they’re just acting innocent because they don’t realise how transparent they are. Although, maybe I spend so much time pretending to be just like them (in terms of gender, not opinion) for the sake of not explaining my identity to every tedious one of them that I forget that they might not see the things that are so obvious to me?

@Argenti

Related — don’t get high in the theatre if you’re in the play.

“Psst! Watch closely, this is a good bit – it’s where I come on!”
“…errm?”
“*munches popcorn*”

I didn’t interpret his quote as saying that anti-rape campaigns turn men gay. Instead, be seemed to be saying that men’s sexuality is repressed by the feminist overlords and as a result of that men, especially gay men, are harmed.

^This

I’m a little bemused that people who are–in my reading of comments in other threads here–are usually careful about making distinctions between concepts, perhaps unintentionally, conflated sexuality with sex acts by seemingly reducing the former to the latter. There may be context I am missing here.

@Athywren – “acting innocent.” Yeah, I guess that explains the whole “But it was a coooompliment! You should be graaaateful!” act. Personally, I always just thought they were too full of themselves to be able to know they were wrong, but maybe they actually do know they’re wrong, and are just acting as if they don’t.

I tend to think of “but it was a compliment!” is just as likely to be gaslighting as stupidity. When it comes to harassment and doubling-down, I’m not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt.

I originally read the OP thing as meaning men are forced to turn gay!!!!1elventy!! because evil women demonise male sexuality and force them to pervert it because there’s no other way those poor boners will get serviced. But yeah, I can see he’s doing something else: conflating a real problem (male homosexuality being demonised) with a nonexistent one (male heterosexuality being demonised).

@kittehserf I think male sexuality is demonized while female sexuality is denied in many ways. The assholes who toss around the word slut while trying to have sex with virgins help build this predatory notion of male sexuality. The MRAs yell and scream about how feminists think all men are rapists while telling rape victims they should have been more careful do the same thing.

Tldr MRAs blame feminists for demonizing male sexuality when the MRAs are the ones who believe sex is something men take from women.

opium4themasses – you mean as in the misogynists are the ones demonising male sexuality? Yeah, that makes sense: they paint men as natural rape machines that wimminz shouldn’t be complaining about (at the same time as screaming NAMALT! every time misogynist behaviour or crime is mentioned).

I was thinking in the broader culture: I don’t see men’s (het) sexuality demonised at all. There’s no slut-shaming for them.

(O’Hara’s claim about the rareness of rape was such a whopper that Al Jazeera felt obligated to note that a recent large-scale study by the Centers for Disease Control found that one in five women in America had experienced rape or attempted rape. Not one in fifty.)

Funnily enough, I was just googling through the archives trying to find a specific post I’d made to see if there were any replies, and I encountered a long-forgotten thread with a long-forgotten troll pulling the same song and dance, downplaying every statistic in every study he didn’t like by an order of magnitude and playing up every statistic he wanted by an order of magnitude.

I know this fool personally and the fact that you have devoted so much of your time and energy trying to discredit this moron is crazy. First of all as he states they get 30,000 views a day which I’m positive has only gotten to that level because you have brought so much attention to them. And to try to somehow pin this fucking nut Roger to them makes you look so desperate. Stop giving them attention and fight them on the real issues that need to be addressed. Like this, even if his wacky figures of only 1 in 50 women being sexually assaulted is correct then what would his reaction be if 1 in 50 men got their dicks cut off? It’s that easy to punch holes in their empty arguments. So stop reaching. And most importantly, stop making a dude who has no real job, lives in a room with piles of dirty clothes and dishes, doesn’t wash with soap, and is a drunk make any sort of impact in this world.

Honestly I was amazed at all the time that this fool wasted on AVFM but to find out that there are other people wasting as much time and energy to combat him is fucking CRAY CRAY. You all read or heard his interview, and you’re concerned his ideas may spread? Lull zzzzzzz’s

It just says I need a roommate to pay half the rent because I choose to work as little as possible, and live my life. And that I don’t care what people believe, no matter how foolish or disgusting. He doesn’t hurt people, and even if I thought his mindless rhetoric might inspire someone to violence, that’s on that person not an idea. If you’re too mindless to understand that then you;re a bigger fool than him.

You think misogyny doesn’t hurt people because it’s just an idea? Tell that to the 1 in 5 women who have been raped or sexually assaulted, the three women a day killed by a current or former partner in the US alone, and talk to the just about all of us who experience street harassment.